If you plan to make a living from online advertising, do not use Google AdSense because running Google ads on your website will only return pennies per click. That’s a piece of advice coming from Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher.
Foremski shares some valid concerns - AdSense publishers have to accept the pricing of the advertising fixed by AdWords and second, Google is shrinking the percentage of AdSense revenue that it shares with its publishing partners.
However, the question is that if you block AdSense from occupying any real estate on your web pages, who else do you approach for filling all those vacant spots ? Small publishers neither have the time nor can afford to hire an independent sales team.
Let’s see what choices (other than AdSense) are available to web publishers who want to make some money out of their web content:
Yahoo! Panama and Microsoft adCenter are not so popular and available only to US publishers. BlogAds, Federated Media, WPNI Blogroll and TechDispenser offer better rates but are open only to select group of websites. Non US traffic cannot be monetized with WidgetBucks or Chitika. Very few sites are successful with affiliate programs of Amazon or eBay.
Readers will abandon your blog if you become regular to PayPerPost kind of programs. And selling Text Link Ads will definitely put your Google rankings in jeopardy. Do you know of other AdSense alternatives in the International space that can guarantee returns ?
Agree, AdSense does sometime pay pennies per click but these pennies definitely add up to enable you pay the web hosting fees and other utility bills. And if you have fair number of eyeballs to your website, these AdSense pennies together can actually help you live a comfortable life.
Related: AdSense Premium Publishers
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/making-a-living-from-google-adsense/1848/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Amit,
I think the online advertising model is in very nascent stage. Yes we saw Google AdSense giving hope to earn few extra bucks but I am to believe that there is huge gap & opportunity which will be filled up by innovations.
I do come up with queries when I see Online Advertising. For instance, how one advertiser know a publisher having relevant content ? Who sets the price? The real content generator gets the money or is there still middleman as a platform gets more money?
Amit, it is widely believed that Facebook is pallning to introduce an advertising system soon, which some analysts believe could compete with Google’s. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Written by Vijayendra Darode on 11.27.07
Thanks for this post Amit.
Any Idea When Yahoo! Panama and Microsoft adCenter are going to be released for India publishers.
and I would like to see a post on Google Finance and other Finance sites.
Dutt
Amit sir,
I am a new blogger and hope to get into active blogging soon.But this post shows that the scenario isnt looking good, if you get into blogging and want to make it a full time profession.
I am just in the learning phase now. You are an experienced blogger. Sir, if you were to advice a new blogger about actively monetizing, what approach would you advice. Do you think the future is grim for new bloggers who aspire to make blogging a full time profession?
What approach would you advice? Please share your expertise and guide me!
Written by Krunal on 11.27.07
Yes, AdSense often pays pennies per click, however this is corollary to the fact that most bloggers write about things that are of concern to no one. Short, pithy, journal-style blog posts are not going to be paired with expensive keywords. The CTR will be low, and the majority of those who do bite probably will not convert. As a result, Google will price out advertising on said blogs at a very low rate.
One the other hand, blogs that feature a good amount of original content with substance, discussing topics that Internet users are actively seeking out, will benefit from the AdSense system.
It all boils down to the relevance algorithm of adsense. There is some work going on regarding forming a consortium similar to adsense, somewhere there we’ll find the answer.
Krunal,
It takes lot of time, energy and SEO technique to make decent earning from Google adsense. Don’t give your day time job, start with your project and see how it worked out for you.
And for god’s sake don’t start site on making money online or copy other idea. Create something unique and make a business plan.
My income bit down since Oct-20, but it will back. If you have tons of unique content, you can easily make $5-15k from Google.
Good luck!
Written by Amrit on 11.27.07
but amit you make 8k usd per month from each of your blog right ?
How does Adbrite - http://www.adbrite.com/ compare for publishers in India? Does anyone have any feedback?
Written by anil on 11.28.07
Actually, there is no alternative to Adsense, believe me. I own a blog too and I’ve tried out no less than a dozen different ad networks. No one pays as good as Adsense. So unless you can sell adspace directly to advertisers, don’t ever think of replacing adsense.
Adbrite doesn’t work as adsense. Advertisers have to find your site and agree to place ads on them. Otherwise no ad will be shown.
Google Adsense is best paying advertising agency at the moment, and i have tried CPX also which also pays good for Pop ups and Pop unders and can make you 60-70% of what adsense makes.
They are also not so conecerned about policy violations etc and wont ban your account for no reason as google Adsense does.
also moenterising your blogs by selling links etc is always a better option :)
I don’t understand how the pic you have displayed can be true. Even at the rate of 10 cents per click, perhaps the least google offers, with 50 clicks, $5 would have to be the minimum amount that is to display.
Great post! Google Adsense is still a 500 million per quarter opportunity for any blogger with relevant content and employing… as the geeks call it… the “white hat SEO” techniques.
So you have to keep writing good content which enables Google crawlers patrolling the “netsphere” and your site to display relevant ads… allowing indexing and page ranking of sites correctly… this makes the interaction with a reader more interesting, creating a curiosity to click on the ads.
There are other monetization techniques that come infrequently… paid sponsors… selling merchandise as relates to your blog, individual companies approaching you to display an ad about products or services… etc
Bottom line you need to invest time on your system design, good html/css coding, follow the Google webmaster guidelines to avoid site being removed from the search engine indexing. Keep implementing new things within reason and relevance to your area of expertise or topics you blog about, don’t be stuck in one old way just because it works. be innovative, try different codes, different positioning… etc
As you blog you start to social network and learn from your fellow bloggers… other ways to monetize.
Good Luck to all trying to be independent… Don’t give up… keep writing good content. websitevaluecalculator.com
Hi Amit,
I am writing this blog and have done fairly well in Google adsense, earning about 200 dollars in the past 2 and a half months. I have also installed Google analytics, the trading code.
I have managed to write content which are SEO friendly and they wud usually come in the first two pages of Google. I wud see an appreciation of 2-6 dollars per day.
However for the past week, there has been a huge dip. My appreciation per day is just .48 cents or .70 cents.
I dont know why the page views are negligible and why the appreciation is so late, inspite of doing the same thing which worked well for me last month..
Can you help me?
Hey just wanted to add that Chitika actually supports traffic from countries outside the USA. All of Chitika’s supported countries are:
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, UK, US.
We are always working to increase our supported countries list. We are currently working on expanding into India.
This does not mean we do not accept applications from websites/blogs outside these countries, we do. This is a list of the countries in which we can pay our publishers for traffic from!
-Karla Escolas, Chitika, Inc.
Google really pays pennies per click. I have read somewhere that it only pay around 10% to publishers of what advertisers pay to google!
There should be some mechanism of direct relationship between publishers and advertisers.
Erm, ever heard of doubleclick? I believe it’s the “only” adv company that is capable of competing with Google Adsense. That’s why Google is try soo damn hard to buy them out.
Written by Theodor on 11.29.07
I still think, there is NO adsense alternatives!
Hey Theodor - DoubleClick was recently accquired by Google, Their Hard Work Paid Off :)
Written by Maverick on 11.29.07
Amit, please tell that the picture you have displayed is photoshopped. I make more than that money with less than a tenth of impressions..
I find that the high-profile bloggers generating a lot of income diversify their revenue streams across several services. We’ve all heard the horror stories of Google crippling someone’s earnings because of suspected click fraud. If and when I reach a level where income from my site actually factors into my financial forecast, I will follow suit and diversify as much as possible.
i was too wondering why my earnings were dipping. Yah definitely google is paying less these days.
Angelina
i was to wondering other ad networks are come and take place of Google ad sense .and give better cost.
after all you are right about ad sense.
Interesting comments from everyone. Several months ago I would have agreed with most of the comments. However, I have recently learned from a video series that I purchased that the one thing I lacked was a high nunmber of “impressions” of my Adsene ads. The only way to assure that I would generate a high percentage of impressions was by having a lot of blogs or websites. I decided to try the blogs which cost me nothing. I picked 10 different topics that are of interest to me and I found a great source of free content. I carefully searched for the most relevant content and posted them each week. I then began to see that my blogs were getting “pinged” regularly and I was generating a very good CTR. This has translated into higher revenues for me. I also added a signature to each of my posts which includes an affiliate link. This has also been generating a decnt income. My next move is to add 10 more blogs within the next month and duplicate what I have already done. Afterall, If I can generate 100 clicks per day with 10 blogs, why wouldn’t I be able to double my clicks and income with twice as many blogs? Remember, all I have to do is add a new content rich post once per week to keep it fresh for the search engine spiders.
i’m still looking for something better than Adsense, couldn’t find anything so far
Written by Blospard on 12.12.07
Very helpful post. I am hoping that in the future I could make a living from my blog. I recently added Google AdSense and haven’t really made any money, but am hoping that changes since I am settled down and can update my website everyday.
Luis, you sound interesting. Can you sometime explain it further. I have a travel blog to help travellers with travel advice etc on India. I am able to generate some traffic in the last few weeks but it does not add to page visits logged by sitemeter on the blog. Also, I am not sure whether the page visits and page views OR hits are what count for adsense and visibility.